Category Archives: Gender Gibberish

Over at Pink Is for Boys, they’ve been talking about a book call ‘Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality’ and an interview the parents gave about raising their son.

The post really resonated with me, so I’m going to reproduce it here.

‘I found myself getting really angry as they described his childhood — not at his parents, who I think are brave to share their story, warts and all, especially considering the drubbing they’re taking in the comments section online. (“These parents are cringe worthy – over-indulgent and insistent that their child be special.” “There’s no way you can tell a small child is gay.” “This is all about how you’re so great because you were ok with him being gay.” “You pushed him to come out – maybe he’s not really gay, just following your prompt.”)

‘But I did cringe, especially at the interview story summarized on the website:

‘On the painful decision to take away Joe’s Barbie dolls [his parents hid the Barbies in the attic and pretended they didn’t know where they’d gone]

‘Jeanne Mixon: “My concerns were that the other kids would tease him — that they wouldn’t understand, and that he wouldn’t fit in. It’s important in elementary school, and even in middle school; they’re very conformist ages. And if you don’t fit in, you get teased and ridiculed. And as it turned out, even with taking the Barbies away, he didn’t fit in; he wasn’t like the other children. But I wanted to give him a chance to be as much like them, and to be able to fit into the social group, if possible — and I knew that taking a dressed-up Barbie as a boy to kindergarten was gonna set him apart, and he’d never have that chance — that no one would forget it. And in that school system, you’re in with the same children from kindergarten through fifth grade, so that’s six years of people remembering you’re the kid who took the Barbies to school. I didn’t want that to happen to him.”

‘I found myself wanting to hurl useful, clever critical analyses at the radio like, “He still didn’t fit in? No shit!” or “You think?” Again, not really directed at the mother — I know so many parents in this boat, letting their sons wear dresses at home but not in public, or letting their daughters wear vests and ties at home but not to church. And I know firsthand the worry about bullying. But it makes me so angry at our culture – that has so scrambled our instinctual drive to protect our children that we think they’ll be better off being someone other than themselves. So poor Joe still didn’t fit in, he didn’t get to be himself, and he got the message that his parents thought who he was wasn’t ok. Ugh. So painful.

‘Frederick Douglass said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” That’s where I’m placing my bet, and I’m all in. If it makes you, or anyone else in society, momentarily uncomfortable, I have faith that you’ll be all right.

My favourite bit?

‘But it makes me so angry at our culture – that has so scrambled our instinctual drive to protect our children that we think they’ll be better off being someone other than themselves.’

You’ll remember I struggled with this a while ago, when L’il Boo was all about being ‘the boy in the dress‘. And I concluded that if he wanted to wear a dress, he could wear a dress.

On the simple basis that I couldn’t see an end to what not allowing him to was the beginning of.

The path that begins, as do all journeys, with a small step: I love you, my son, but not that part of you. Because that part of you is inconvenient/unacceptable/disgusting. That part of you, we’ll gloss over, OK?

And so with Barbies as with dresses. Once you hide the Barbies and your child still isn’t ‘like the other children‘, what’s the next step in making him like them, in making him ‘normal’?

How far do you? Does Ken get it next? And if Ken gets murdered in the attic, how do you square yourself to the basic weirdness that a GI Joe doll survives the ‘doll’ cull, despite just being Ken in a uniform?? And will GI Joe survive the first ‘death to all girly dolls’ pogrom only to get it in the second ‘death to all possible gay influences’ pogrom due to his metrosexual, hairless chest and suspicious tendency to only associate with other males? Remember, unsubstantiated rumours have killed millions of actual people, never mind plastic ‘action figures’.

Actually, I see now where it does end. It ends in parental exhaustion due to ridiculous over-thinking.

And where do your kids end up?

They end up safe in the knowledge that all your be-who-you-are-you’re-wonderful rhetoric is bullshit.

Oh, I don’t know. I get the pressure. I get the parental instinct to hope that your kids ‘fit in’. But I just don’t think that in the long run, there’s a viable alternative to letting your kids be as oddly normal or as normally odd as they are.

Yes, I think you do have to make your kids aware that people will give them shit for being who they are.

But you know what? Haters gonna hate, my friend, and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop that.

So you’ve just got to let the kids be. As long as they’re not hurting anybody or torturing small animals (which you really should intervene in ‘cos you’ve got a serial killer on your hands and I’m not that much of a liberal). I’m not saying it’s always easy, because god knows it’s not, but from where I’m sitting, I just can’t see a viable alternative.

Because if there’s one thing worse than being hated for who you are, it’s being hated for who you’re not.

When I say ‘raising gender non-conforming kids is the frontline of feminist mothering‘, I mean that this is really what feminist parenting is.

If you raise your kids by feminist principles, you will have gender non-conforming kids.

Yes, you will.

And, no, not because you have ‘indoctrinated’ the poor sods with all that feminazi stuff like, oh, equal pay and mutual respect, but simply because you didn’t put them in a box and hit them with the freak stick every time they slid a finger out to try and fashion a breathing hole.

My children are in fact remarkably gender conforming, all things considered.

And by ‘all things considered’ I mean of course the vast, encompassing influences brought to bear by society, by advertising, by snotty kids who do live in boxes at home but unfortunately also get let out to go to school with my kids.

By ‘all things considered’ I mean that I have managed in some small, tiny way, to keep the box lid open, just a crack.

Largely disgusted by approximately 98.7% of content on the Internet, I restrict my internet viewing to stuff that I like.

Which means my Internet reading is essentially a couple of news sites, and various feminist blogs with the odd site about raising gender non-conforming kids thrown in, because, well, because those sites are where my passions for feminism and child rearing kind of come together.

Because make no mistake: raising gender non-conforming kids is the frontline of feminist mothering. Nothing will test you as a feminist mother more than watching your children try to swim in the real-life waters off the coast of your island of theories.

And nothing has illustrated this better lately than this clip of bullying from ABC’s What Would You Do. I call it bullying because, baby, that’s what it is.

What makes this bullying appear so much worse than normal – so much worse that it can be hard to even see it as bullying – is that depicts a small child being bullied by adults. And not only by his/her mother (who was of course only an actress), but by random strangers.

If these people came across this kid and started beating the crap out of him because he wasn’t ‘behaving right’, we’d see it more clearly. What we see instead are these adults beating the crap out of him psychologically. He/she is being bullied for not ‘behaving right’ – for not keeping within the confines of his or her gender.

The concerned/disgusted looks, the sotto voce remarks, the general view mum has to ‘stop it now’. All of this tell the child clearly that he/she is not acceptable. That they are not acceptable as they are. That they must change.

And people will do this to a child on Halloween, for crap’s sake; the one night of the year when we are supposed to be dressed as ‘something else’.

I didn’t see it as bullying at first either. What called it out to me was the appearance of the wonderful Sally at the end. That, and the fact that I almost cried when she appeared simply because, finally, somebody did see what was happening and immediately showed compassion to the child.

It should not bring tears to my eyes simply to watch an adult respect a child as a human being.

In much the same way as I hesitate to describe Boogie as transgender, I similarly hesitate to describe L’il Boo as such. Partly, this is because he’s so frickin’ young still and I find it hard to believe that kids even do gender at his age (a grand old three).

I know that they do ‘do’ gender in the sense that they’re massively aware of it, if only in that they understand there are ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ and that this distinction, whilst still fuzzy for them, is incredibly important. I know this because Cordelia Fine told me; all hail The Fine! And seriously, if you haven’t read Delusions of Gender yet, why the hell not? It’s informative, funny and the only book you need to understand how the Patriarchy fucks us from the moment we’re born. What’s not to like?

But ‘do’ do gender? I don’t think so. He’s still at a stage where, while he’s figured out there’s a distinction, he’s no real idea where the lines are drawn. So whilst he may shout ‘I’ll crack you like an egg!’ as he launches himself off the sofa at you, he’ll still cry if he can’t find his kiwi Pinypon doll. Course, as he’s just started school, this will all change too, too soon.

But there’s no two ways about it. If you take a literal translation of transgender – ‘denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender‘ – then that’s what he clearly is. Because he’s, like, a real, actual human being and not a cardboard cut-out of Batman.

All of us, but especially kids as young as L’il Boo, are at least a little bit transgender, aren’t we?

Because not a single person on this planet ‘conforms unambiguously‘ to notions of gender. Show me somebody who does and I’ll show you an unhappy liar.

I, for example, get all teary over Dogs Trust adverts, but can assemble flat pack furniture like Bob the Builder’s show-off sister.

The BoogieMeister can watch sport – any sport – for 7 hours straight, but can rock a scented-candle-lit bath like a fragrant porpoise.

And L’il Boo? Well, the poor schmuck’s all over the place gender-wise. The poor little sod still thinks he can just be who he likes, do what he likes and like what he likes. ‘Gender confused‘ is what he is.

In one of those meandering trips that the internet often takes you on and wastes your entire day with, I’ve been reading blogs written by parents of kids who nudge, push or whack gender boundaries on their arse.

It’s nice, because I have one of those myself; the lovely Boogie projects gender in such a straightforwardly confusing way that she’s mistaken for a boy about half the time by random strangers.

Not that she has to do much to achieve that effect.

Nothing will convince you of the complete, utterly arbitrary nature of gender more than having this happen even when she’s doing nothing; for a girl to get read as a boy these days, it’s entirely sufficient for her to have a short haircut and wear tracksuit pants. Incredible, I know, but (sadly) I kid you not.

I sometimes think that anything under-12 not pink and frilled may soon have to wear a forehead stamp, or a unicorn’s horn, if it’s a girl – you know, just so people aren’t made to feel uncomfortable.

I say ‘these days’ but that’s clap trap. One of ‘these days’ I’ll bore you rigid entertain you with hilarious tales from my childhood when I was mistaken for a boy about 85% of the time. And that was so long ago, pink hadn’t even been invented.

Of course, the reason we rely on such clearly unsatisfactory markers to establish gender in children – hair length, trousers, lack of obvious adornment – is because very few children look so ‘obviously’ male or female that their sex would shine through any of that window dressing. Pre-puberty, (clothed) body markers are non-existent, and facially, all children look more or less pudding-like, don’t you think?

By that I mean of course that they all have that soft, round, air-of-plumpness quality which is what makes them so cute.

While wearing trousers, with her short hair and all and her lack of clips and frills and pink, and all the other markers we expect of a girl, Boogie does look entirely like a boy. Or, at least like how we expect a boy to look.

She has never, however, been misidentified as a boy when wearing a dress; because short hair and all, a simple piece of material is still enough to alter her perceived gender projection entirely. And yes, she does look entirely like a girl.

I can further confirm that if L’il Boo wears a dress he, too, is always identified as a girl. Even if he is engaging in full-blown ‘masculine’ behaviour, like pretending to shoot everything in sight whilst picking his nose.

A dress, it seems, is a powerful thing.

And I’ll tell ya, a weird thing to hang something as fundamental as gender on. Not fundamental to me, of course, but then this whole gender thing wasn’t my fucking idea, was it?

And because gender is so arbitrary, I hesitate when I describe Boogie as one of those kids I’ve been reading about.

So the girl likes tracksuit pants (because they’re better for running, see?) and doesn’t like hair clips (annoying, see?); it’s hardly revolutionary, is it? She’s not even going to get a support group, for god’s sake. And she certainly doesn’t regard herself as bending anything, not yet at least.

Her gender fluidity is entirely dependent on others’ perceptions. And if people’s perceptions weren’t so restrictive, she wouldn’t be ‘misidentified’ at all because they’d have to ask her what sex she was first before making assumptions about her based on whether a piece of material is stitched down the middle or not.

And if the whole thing wasn’t so fucking weird, people wouldn’t give a flying fuck anyway.

Why does it feel weirder to watch a man kiss a dolphin than to watch a woman kiss a dolphin?

These are the kind of questions which arise when, through a series of unfortunate events, you find yourself in Benidorm. Watching a dolphin show, obviously. It’s not like Benidorm is full of dolphin-human couples copping off in darkened nightclubs. Even in Benidorm you have to go to a special place for that sort of thing.

Part of the show – which wasn’t my cup of tea in its entirety, in fairness; I’m not big on animal shows, too exploitative, too demeaning, too illustrative of the one-trick pony-ness of sea lions, whose skills compared to dolphins’ are extremely limited (don’t get me wrong, clapping is an amusing and important animal skill, but its appeal wanes considerably next to the sight of dolphins pulling children through the water on boats, before back-flipping over a high wire and then finishing off with a bit of synchronised swimming, not to mention doing some of the above whilst spinning a hoop on their snouts; what can I say? I felt the sea lions needed a better choreographer) – where was I?

Ah, yes, part of the show involved what can only be described as a bit of light romance. Two of the trainers, one female, one male, got their groove on with some slow dance music and some slow balletic movements (I hesitate to describe it as dancing but this, I fear, was what it was meant to be) with their dolphin of choice which, as the music ended, turned into a kind of heavy petting session. I didn’t mind my kids watching but I felt fairly certain that at least a portion of the audience were Sun and/or Daily Male readers who would lynch the dancing couples as soon as they realised what was going on. Cross-species love?? And weren’t those dolphins immigrants?? I feared for their lives, I really did.

But as they concluded with long drawn-out snogs with tongues, I couldn’t help but be aware – because did I mention feminism ruins your life? – that I found the man kiss even more disturbing than the woman kiss.

Which feeling of course involves two assumptions; 1. that all animals are male and 2. that everyone is heterosexual. Which, of course, if you’re not damned with an awareness of feminist analysis of such things, would both completely pass you by and you could just bask in the glory of a human-dolphin lip-smacker and maybe idly imagine what a human-dolphin hybrid would look like (large-nosed and with one thick leg, ending in feet but with webbed toes, if you’re interested).

Both of which would be preferable to the scraming inside your head that Patriarchy fucks everything up!

I mean, Jeez, if you can’t enjoy a bit of woman (or man) on dolphin action what is the fucking point?

In answer to the obvious questions, yes, I am on holiday and yes, I am going slightly sun-crazy.